SCHELLING, HEIDEGGER, AND EVIL A thesis submitted To Kent State University in partial Fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts by Devon Hawkins May, 2015 © Copyright All rights reserved Except for previously published materials Thesis written by Devon Hawkins B.A., Westminster College, 2003 Approved by Gina Zavota, Associate Professor, Ph.D., Department of Philosophy, Masters Advisor Deborah R. Barnbaum, Professor, Ph.D., Chair, Department of Philosophy James L. Blank, Ph.D., Dean, College of Arts and Sciences TABLE OF CONTENTS...............................................................................................................iii INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................1 CHAPTERS I. Defining the Concept of Evil............................................................................................5 Aristotle’s Evil.......................................................................................................13 Kant’s Evil.............................................................................................................18 Conclusion.............................................................................................................26 II. Schelling, Heidegger, and Evil......................................................................................28 The Theodical Project............................................................................................29 Schelling on God’s Creation..................................................................................33 Schelling on Humans’ Creation.............................................................................36 Heidegger on Schelling..........................................................................................40 Conclusion.............................................................................................................44 III. Evil after Theodicy......................................................................................................46 Nietzsche’s Evil.....................................................................................................47 Arendt and the Banality of Evil.............................................................................54 Conclusion.............................................................................................................60 CONCLUSIONS...........................................................................................................................62 BIBLIOGRAPHY..........................................................................................................................65 iii INTRODUCTION In his 1809 treatise, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, F.W.J. Schelling offers a free-will theodicy that seeks to establish a positive ontology for evil, a project begun by Immanuel Kant, and to revive natural philosophy. My project is to establish a secularized concept of evil by filtering Schelling’s philosophy through that of Martin Heidegger. In order to establish why Schelling’s philosophy is essential to my project, it is important to understand how it stands apart from its predecessors. Likewise, to draw conclusions regarding the best concept of evil for a contemporary context, it is important to understand how Schelling’s philosophy connects to its successors. As such, I first will review various contemporary concepts of evil so as to define the “evil” with which my project deals. Then, I will review philosophers relevant to the creation and development of a positive ontology for evil; these philosophers include Aristotle, Kant, Schelling, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Hannah Arendt. Special focus will be paid to Schelling, of course, as I will use Heidegger’s phenomenology to draw out a secularized conception of evil from Schelling’s free-will theodicy. Chapter one defines the concept of evil and offers several general varieties. As we will see, this project will focus only on narrow moral evil. Also excluded will be an account of moral personhood. Instead, I seek to establish a positive ontology for evil, which centers evil’s existence in action. Thus, I assume those who perpetrate evil are necessarily moral agents of the human variety. I make no further claims about moral agency other than assuming that human beings are, in fact, capable of it. The end of chapter one reviews the philosophies of Aristotle and 1 Kant as the most important predecessors of Schelling in the context of this project. Specifically treated are each philosopher’s conceptions of evil and, more broadly, morality. As a virtue ethicist, Aristotle considers character of paramount importance to morality. Evil, for Aristotle, grows out of a malformation of character. There are varying degrees of severity in regard to malformed character, the worst of which is wickedness. Wickedness involves a willing departure from the tenets of good character. Kant also sees evil as a willing departure, but from universal, rational, moral law, rather than habituated good character. Kant considers evil radical, or present in the root of humankind. Kant seeks to delineate a secular, moral evil, but in his insistence that humans have a “propensity” to evil, he blurs the line he tried to create between Christian ideas of original sin and humans’ metaphysical capacity for evil. Schelling’s philosophy shows clear connections to Kant’s concept of will and his desire to create a positive ontology for evil. Chapter two focuses on Schelling’s theodicy and filters it through Heidegger’s phenomenology by way of key points of similarity. The chapter begins by briefly discussing the theodical project and its varying degrees of relevance for philosophers (especially the contrasting opinions of Kant and Schelling) to the concept of evil. Schelling viewed nature and God as equiprimordial, or simultaneously existent. Further, God contains nature even though nature is separate from Him. Nature is a creative force that represents a dark ground for Schelling. In God, then, there are two principles: light and dark, or understanding and chaos. These principles are in perfect harmony in God, because He is wholly unified—his principal parts are inseverable. In humans, who share God’s principle parts, light and dark are not perfectly unified. Because the principles of light and dark can separate from each other and from the centrum, or nexus, within humans, the possibility of evil exists. Heidegger’s concept of humankind, called Dasein, also has pure possibility. Several of Dasein’s modes of being and activities, like authenticity, anxiety, 2 facticity, and falling, align with the Schelling’s conceptions of evil’s possibility and actuality in humans. Chapter two ends with an explanation of these terms and their connection to Schelling’s theodicy. Chapter three, then, treats the progression of the concept of evil from Schelling to Nietzsche to Arendt. Nietzsche witnessed the beginning of the Nazi movement and Arendt witnessed its climax. In Nietzsche’s philosophy we see the same reverence for balance in nature of order and chaos. He echoes Schelling’s belief that light cannot exist without dark, just as dark cannot exist without light. We also see in Nietzsche’s philosophy the more explicit ancestor, ressentiment, of Arendt’s later concept of “the banality of evil.” Ressentiment is a spiteful desire for revenge often driven by superficial jealousies or perceived slights. Manifested in a social or political context, ressentiment combined with nineteenth-century Europe’s concern that humanity was degenerating to create an atmosphere ripe for the Nazi movement. Chapter three closes with Arendt’s analysis of the banality of evil, which encompasses the bureaucratic structures that enabled mass murder during the Holocaust. Arendt makes clear the new reality of evil in a global community. Her report of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the former Nazi officer, reveals the accountability that follows accepting an action-based positive ontology of evil. The state, or the “movement,” in Eichmann’s case, cannot remove responsibility for one’s actions, even if those actions are banal outside the context of the broader group’s (state’s or movement’s) actions. Over the course of this project, we will find that when we uncover evil’s positive ontology and lay bare its actualization by humans, we ground an approach to evil suited to the political necessities of the twenty-first century. That is, we see that a proper philosophical understanding of evil necessarily calls us to a political address of the same. The view of this 3 thesis is that such an address must combine perpetrator, victim, and by-stander approaches to the evil at issue. I will explain this combination approach in the next chapter, after I define “evil.” 4 CHAPTER I Defining the Concept of Evil The struggle to define “evil,” and even the question of whether there is an “evil” to define, are contentious matters among philosophers. For my purposes, then, it is necessary to identify the “evil” with which I will deal below. Evil can be classified as either “broad” or “narrow.” In the broadest sense, evil can be defined as all character flaws, wrongful actions, or unsavory states of affairs. Paul Formosa refers to this sense of evil as “axiological”: “evil” and “bad” function synonymously given an axiological understanding of evil.1 Broad evil further can be subdivided into natural evil and